


morning star

by foolish_mortal



Category: Kingsman: The Secret Service (2015)
Genre: Demons, M/M, Mythology - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-09-12
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-04-20 10:42:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4784396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolish_mortal/pseuds/foolish_mortal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lee Unwin already made a devil's bargain to keep his family safe, so it’s only a matter of time before his son does the same. The apple never falls far from the tree, after all, and Harry knows all about apples. Satan!Harry AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ladyjdee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladyjdee/gifts).



> Finally, the start of my work on my [Satan Harry tumblr prompt](http://foolishmortal.tumblr.com/post/119422596903/satan-au-harry-hart-is-actually-lucifer) seeing the light of day. Thank you thank you thank you to the tireless and invaluable work of my beta and Hartwin feels comrade [ladyjdee](http://ladyjdee.tumblr.com/), without whom this fic would never have left the scraps pile of my hard drive.

**i.**

If there's one thing the songs got right, Harry Hart does consider himself a man of exceptional wealth and taste. He's seen empires rise and fall, the miracle of life and its inevitable passage into death, the dawn and dusk of every wonder of the world, and if there’s one thing he loves about humanity—loves more fiercely than that ancient bugger up in the sky ever could, if he's honest—it's their sheer, bloody-minded tenacity, their raw ambition, their thirst to suck the marrow from the bone of life, and their perverse optimism to try try again till the world spins their way.

Of course, that's where Harry comes in, offering them a chance to skip the queue, so to speak; send Cinderella off to the ball in her gown to woo a prince, and if the pumpkin coach back home takes a route a great deal more southerly than expected, well…Harry's got to keep the lights on too. (The flaming pits of Hell are said never to go out, but Harry does have to leave his armchair once in awhile to stack another log into the fireplace in his parlour, usually just when he's reached the good part of his book.)

But of course, the other thing Harry adores about humanity is its endearingly forgetful habit of repeating its mistakes; a doomed mitochondrial inheritance from parent to child, sibling to sibling, till Hell is practically a big family reunion once everyone gets sorted. (Family reunions are a particularly Infernal circle that Harry does not care to repeat, himself.)

For example, Lee Unwin, a South London man, honourably discharged from the Army and struggling to make ends meet for his family, lying in a pool of blood on the side of the road beside a smashed up car while he promises away what precious little he has so that Harry will restore his wife and child – unbreak them, unshatter them, pristine to a degree doctors and police will declare miraculous—to let them continue living for just a fraction longer.

If Harry ever pities humans, it's because pity is a downstream of emotion dispensed by a party who's found himself securely on higher ground. In any case, what does interest Harry is investment and diversification (Wall Street, one of his finer works), and he knows the value of spending a little soul to reap it back, especially for a strata of people who could use a leg up to stand on an even playing field. Harry's quite the humanitarian.

In the limp, bloody form of Lee's child underneath the twisted undercarriage, Harry sees his father's mistakes and his mother's faith, a creature brought forth in iniquity, a promise and a prodigal son who will someday return to Harry's hand as Lee does now. The apple never falls far from the tree, after all, and Harry knows all about apples.

**ii.**

Calling Harry's omnipresence the ability to be anywhere incorrectly implies a particular force of intent, the presupposition that any crevice of Earth is empty till the Devil chooses to manifest himself; the more complicated answer is that Harry _is_ everywhere, all the time, in every created molecule that God pissed into existence. He can be tempting a politician in Moscow while twisting up a cyclone in the Indian Ocean, and planting sedition in mind of a top military official in Botswana. To Harry, it's no more effort than carrying on a conversation while blinking his eyes and breathing at the same time (two human tics that Harry in fact has no need for). A finger in every pie, to use a wonderfully English expression—ah, lovely Europe, generally agreed to have carried out many of Harry's good works in the Age of Imperialism – and sometimes, if Harry is very patient, he finds a plum.

This particularly ripe plum surfaces nearly two decades later at a police station – an older, handsomely defiant Eggsy Unwin, trapped inside an interrogation room with an aura so deliciously _despairing_ that Harry’s mouth fairly waters. This is a young man Harry could be proud to possess, a boy who has always turned his back on the world so that he could never watch it leave him, his unfulfilled body yearning for promises, and _oh_ , how Harry wants to _pluck_ him.

Harry assumes his favourite shape as he glides unnoticed into the station, pristine suit, umbrella, a man of the world and everything underneath it. “I can make this go away,” he tells Eggsy, and the charges are reversed with a snap of his fingers. Eggsy follows him out, slack-jawed and unprotesting, all too easy.

"Let me take care of them," Harry offers at the Black Prince and puts on a show thrashing all of Dean’s men, fulfilling Eggsy’s secret, long-held desire to do the same, and Harry is nothing if not his willing instrument. Eggsy is starry-eyed as Harry returns to finish off the Guinness, and Harry allows himself to preen. Promises, promises, he reminds himself.

He sends Eggsy back home to Dean deliberately – there can be no hope without the loss of it, after all – but reappears later, solicitous and gentle, as he produces a cold compress for Eggsy’s predictably blackened eye. Eggsy winces yet leans into the touch, and Harry clucks, a toneless familial sound that Eggsy will associate with affection. "I can help you," Harry soothes, and Eggsy believes him. After all, Harry understands more than most about absent father figures.

It isn’t Harry's doing that earns Eggsy a nomination into the Kingsman candidacy for Lancelot, but he _is_ the one who jams Higgins's gun during a crucial firefight exercise and sabotages Digby during the parachute test, sparing him from living another second with such an unfortunate name.

Eggsy is furious once he finds out, but Harry perseveres. "You’ll need all the help you can get," he purrs, perched on the corner of Eggsy’s bed in the dwindling barracks (he likes the irony of it, and no angelic guardian to oppose him on the other side, either), and they face each other silently in the dim, stuffy darkness for so long that Harry thinks Eggsy's drifted to sleep. Eggsy's stylised Kingsman pendant gleams moon-bright at his throat, and Harry meditates on the nature of silver – spoons, bullets, thirty pieces of coin – and the things people will do for more.

Finally Eggsy bends, not away but closer, and Harry watches, enraptured, as Eggsy bites his lip and assents with a quiet nod.

**iii.**

Eggsy is having second thoughts about circumventing Roxy Morton for the Lancelot position. Harry's job would be much easier if Eggsy didn't get so bloody attached to everyone.

"She deserves it, Harry," Eggsy argues and scratches an unharmed J.B. behind the ears. ("James Brown?" Harry inquired hopefully after being introduced to the puppy. "I never laid a finger on him, contrary to popular belief." Eggsy rolled his eyes and told Harry he needed to start watching television.) "She don't have you on her side, either, and she's always been good to me."

J.B. wriggles out of Eggsy's arms to trot over to Harry and paw at the clean line of his pinstriped trousers. Harry warns him away with a glance. "Haven't I been good to you, Eggsy?"

"Well, yeah, of course –"

"I've always looked out for your best interests, you know."

"I know, Harry, and I ain't ungrateful."

Harry rises to his full height, nearly blotting out the light from the perspective of where Eggsy is sitting cross-legged on the bed, which is precisely the effect Harry wants. He settles a hand on Eggsy's shoulder, just where it meets his neck. "I care about you a great deal."

Eggsy is still blissfully unaware of how utterly his eyes give him away as they do now, his gaze transfixed upon Harry’s face and mouth ajar; as vehemently as he rebuffs Harry's continuing interference in his life, his eyes are always starving for more, pleading for everything, and Harry will give him the world.

Eggsy swallows with a click, and Harry smiles a particularly unpleasant smile. "Make a decision, Eggsy."

**iv.**

It's just as well in the end that Professor Arnold's plan to kill most of the world eliminates a few of the Kingsman's own, including a not so pure-hearted Galahad, so Eggsy assumes her title while Roxy becomes Lancelot.

Harry, in his own way, approves of Roxy the way he might approve of an unfashionable pair of slippers Mr. Pickle has serendipitously discovered underneath the bed. While there's no doubt she and Eggsy make a seamless duo, occasionally she's a bit _too_ good at saving Eggsy's life, and Harry is forced to intervene. It wouldn't do to have Eggsy think he doesn't need Harry anymore; it would be a terrible waste of a bargained soul, at any rate, and Harry likes to see all his little endeavours through to completion— he might have been more than a little enthusiastic in personally blowing up Professor Arnold's head.

("A lovely idea, but choose a better puppet next time," Harry advises Valentine, who huffs and complains, "I'm the god of creation. How can I create if nobody destroys shit? Gaia's gonna be pissed." Harry is a big fan of the non-Abrahamic religions.)

Eggsy is just as brilliant a Kingsman as Harry could ever have hoped – ruthless, quick-fingered, and so deviously resourceful that it's almost a physical pleasure to watch him work. There is nothing in existence more beautiful than the capabilities of the human imagination; if idle minds are the devil's playground, then creative ones are his factories, Harry philosophises dreamily. He sips his martini from a high-rise balcony in Hong Kong as Eggsy drowns an assassin in the jewel-bright swimming pool below.

“Hold his head still, darling, or he’ll twist underneath your arm.”

Eggsy's soaked up to his arms, his cotton shirt transparent and clinging to his handsomely-defined chest. “I know how to kill a man, Harry, for fuck’s sake! You come down here and kill him yourself, if you’re so keen!"

Harry smiles and flips his Wayfarers back up.

**v.**

Not a single week goes by now without Eggsy asking, 'Harry, if it's not a bother', 'Harry, it would be nice if', and 'Harry, won't you please?', the last of which Harry likes best of all – indiscriminate evil being no excuse for ungentlemanly behaviour – and he glories in every little concession Eggsy gives him, every small favour, every dissolution of moral fibre that brings Eggsy’s soul further into Harry’s grasp. More the fool he for not realising that Eggsy would take it too far.

Harry's busy toting a few atoms back and forth like an abacus inside a shipment of dirty bombs that will now explode on impact when the familiar strains of Eggsy's attention diverts his focus back to where he's sitting in the unused study of Eggsy's Kingsman-issue house, reading a newspaper.

"Harry," Eggsy calls up the stairs. "Do you mind putting dinner on while I take a bath?"

Shock and irritation poison Harry's good mood. "You..." His curled fingers shred the business section into ribbons. "You want me to _put on dinner_?"

"Yeah, please," Eggsy says, oblivious. "And feed J.B., too? I'll just be a moment, ta."

"I will most certainly not," Harry starts, but he's cut off by the sound of the downstairs door closing and the rush of water.

 _Tick tick, boom_ , and the bombs go off over some precious corner of the Pacific Ocean, harmonising with Harry's temper as he marches downstairs and deliberately ruins all the leftovers Eggsy has in the fridge, even the blancmange, which Eggsy had bought for Daisy's birthday. He's expecting Eggsy to be angry, preparing to give Eggsy a piece of his own mind, but unexpectedly Eggsy just laughs at the state of his kitchen, tells Harry that he’s hopeless, and phones for takeaway.

"What do you want? Panang curry or massaman?" Eggsy asks as he leafs through the menus on the fridge.

Harry is caught off-guard. "I beg your pardon?"

"Well, you're staying, ain’t you?" Eggsy prompts, and Harry has to concentrate on the cool hiss of Pacific depths swallowing up red-hot metal and twisted debris till the odd feeling in his chest subsides.

By the time the curry comes, Harry is feeling more like his usual self. What a petty thing, to be so angered by a mere human who's not been alive for even a hairsbreadth of Harry's existence. Harry even lets Eggsy have first pick of the chopsticks with magnanimous deference.

Harry's been so preoccupied with his own rage that he hasn't noticed Eggsy is injured, not till the boy reaches out with his left hand for the utensils, his right one cradled close to his body. A few broken fingers, courtesy of a mistimed jump out of a third story window, and Harry none the wiser.

Silly creature, asking Harry for something so simple as feeding his dog when he's too injured to feed himself properly. Harry chides Eggsy mentally and snaps the chopsticks apart for him.

Eggsy grins at him. "You're aces, Harry."

"Anytime," Harry replies.

**vi.**

That evening is the beginning of the end. The Devil should know better than to be ensnared in verbal obligation, Harry berates himself, but the damage is done, and now he's being summoned for all sorts of trivial things – dinner at the house at least once a week, fetch at the park with J.B. and Mr. Pickle (”you named a hellhound _Mr. Pickle_ , Harry?”), watching old films on the couch late at night when Eggsy’s feeling lonely and nostalgic. They’re not strictly _requests_ (Harry can’t deny he enjoys himself sometimes, especially the evening they watched _Pretty Woman_ ), but he’s careful to tally them up accordingly, ensuring that Eggsy will be his all the sooner.

Eggsy should really read up on the formal summoning process in his contract, Harry tuts as he jogs up the front steps with a bottle of expensive bourbon tucked under one arm. Otherwise, there's no knowing when Harry will ever relinquish him.

The prospect of Eggsy's perpetual indenture is lovely, and Harry is smiling as Eggsy answers the door. "Compliments of Kentucky," Harry pronounces, raising the bottle. How he loves a good old-fashioned biblical massacre, and in one of Chester's beloved churches too, no less. He deserves the night off, Harry decides, feeling very pleased with himself.

The mood must catch, because soon Eggsy is smiling back at him, honey-eyed and dimpled, over a glass of very fine bourbon indeed — not that anyone would know it by the way Eggsy is swilling it — and so Harry takes the opportunity to lead them through an instructional demonstration on appropriately savouring top-class liquor.

It's all very quaint, the Devil teaching his disciple about vice, Harry's will done on Earth as it is in Hell, but what a fine way to spend an evening all the same, Harry muses deep into his third glass. Enjoying a drink and pleasant conversation with beautiful company ( _very_ beautiful company, Harry corrects as he takes in Eggsy's checked Oxford blue button up, open at the throat). Perhaps he should take nights off more often.

It's late, striking midnight almost, when Eggsy asks him. They’re slumped together on the couch, Eggsy's hand still curled on instinct around his unfinished glass as if he's forgotten about it, and the living room lights intensify the circles under his eyes. "Harry," he slurs softly. "How long do you think I've got down there, when we're finished? Me paying you off and what."

"Not much," Harry lies and touches his lips to his glass to cover a frown. It unnerves him – the wolf dwelling with the lamb – how like-minded he and Eggsy often are. "Time moves differently in Hell. There's no concept of a yesterday and tomorrow, it just _is_."

Eggsy mulls that over with a drunk’s peculiar concentration. "D’you think I can see you again? After, I mean?"

Harry finally recognises the refrain that's been turning over in his mind – it's from _Pretty Woman_ of all things. Somewhere along the way, Eggsy has forgotten that theirs is nothing more than a business transaction, two individuals ensuring their respective ends of an agreement, that Eggsy is paying a dear price for his services. Stockholm syndrome, the wild idiosyncrasies of human emotion. How distasteful.

"You don't want to see me," Harry replies curtly and places his crystal tumbler a touch too forcefully against the glass coffee table. He's more pissed than he thought. "Excuse me, I think I'd best call it an evening."

"You can stay here," Eggsy offers quickly, sounding so terribly _young_ that Harry wants to close his ears against him. "I have a guest room, and J.B. sleeps with me, so he won't be a bother."

"No, thank you, Eggsy," Harry replies with what he hopes is quelling certainty and pushes his glass away to stand up. "I have other matters I must attend to."

“ _Please_ ,” Eggsy implores and curls a hand around Harry's wrist. “Please, I need you. Don’t go.”

Harry turns back  for one last look before he leaves: Eggsy is sprawled over the couch, golden-limbed and gorgeous in the lamplight, his mouth apple-red as original sin, and really, Eggsy should have realised Harry is the last person on Earth who would shy away from temptation.

"Do you understand what you're asking me? What you're _offering_ me?" Harry demands in a low voice. His thumb hovers just above the warm hollow of Eggsy's pulse.

Eggsy closes his eyes and tips back his head, baring his throat. " _Yes, Harry_."

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I want to give my deepest apologies for falling off the face of the earth. If you've been following my tumblr/LJ udpates, you know that real life has been kicking my ass, and I've been struggling with a lot of classic, depressive quarter-life crisis behaviour, which also means the creative juices have dried up. Right now I have to apply my attentions to moving in a better career direction, and once I am in a happier more productive and rewarding place, I am sure the fanfic will kick back in. (I work in technology IRL, and oddly enough I've found that my writer's block and professional creativity often go hand in hand.) 
> 
> In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this next chapter, which should resolve the cliffhanger from chapter 1 and get us up to the E rating that was originally promised (yay). It's been sitting on my harddrive for a while in the vain hopes that I'd get more of it done, but at this point, that will just have to wait till chapter 3. :) 
> 
> As always, you can find me on my tumblr: originally deftmegalodon, now [foolishmortal](foolishmortal.tumblr.com). 
> 
> Lots of love! ~Fumu

**vii.**

It's as if the floodgates have opened, and suddenly they're having incredibly filthy, debaucherous sex whenever and wherever the urge overtakes them – on the floor of Eggsy's bedroom, over the desk in the study, across the mats of an empty sparring room at headquarters, even out in the field, while Eggsy's glasses and earpiece record his every stuttering breath. If Harry thought Eggsy’s despair was sweet, his rapture as Harry takes him apart is like nectar on Harry’s tongue.

"Oh fuck," Eggsy groans and hooks Harry's body against his own with absurdly flexible legs. "Harry, _right there_."

"Here?" Harry grinds in deep where Eggsy is hot and tight. "Here, my darling?"

Eggsy scores his nails across Harry's back. "Yes, _yes_ , oh my god."

Harry winces. "None of that, please," he reminds Eggsy. Having his father's name shouted at him during sex is not an erotic experience.

"Sorry, sorry." Eggsy's body is slick with sweat, his eyes blown wide as if he still can't believe Harry is in his bed. Harry bites his unblemished shoulder in reproach and hitches Eggsy's thighs higher, starting back in on the punishing pace that makes Eggsy pant out his name in an unholy mantra.

Eggsy is a passionate and generous lover, wonderfully responsive and eager to please, the remarkable creativity from his Kingsman work spilling over effortlessly into the bedroom. Harry wonders why he ever thought greed or wrath was the key to swaying Eggsy Unwin towards the crooked well-intentioned path when lust leaves both of them deliciously sated and ravenous for more.

"You don't have no reason to be a person," Eggsy says mellowly as they lay together in the messy afterglow. Harry should be minding drought conditions in the Middle East, but Eggsy is lying on his arm, so Harry is instead indulging in the virtue of sloth.

"Mm," Harry answers and licks a broad stripe up Eggsy's sweaty temple. "How do you mean?"

"I mean, you can be anything or anyone you want." Eggsy's fingertips stroke the soft curve of Harry's spent cock. "Not that this ain't a bloody gorgeous disguise."

Harry seizes Eggsy's wrist to thrust leisurely into his calloused palm. "Would you rather have something else? I can be whatever you want, my dear." To demonstrate, he flicks through a few a few of Eggsy's recent fixations – a woman Eggsy picked up at a club, a footballer from Eggsy's favourite team – before settling back into his accustomed form.

Eggsy gapes at him, and Harry smirks before continuing, his fingers trailing down to Eggsy's navel. "However, I know you've fantasized about being filled up with my come on multiple occasions." A lower caress, behind Eggsy's balls, where he's sticky and used up. "And I do so love giving you what you want."

Eggsy gasps like it's been punched out of his lungs, his lovely chest heaving, all but begging Harry to suck greedily against the knit of flesh and bone underneath his skin, and Harry trails a damp stinging line from Eggsy's sternum all the way down to the juncture of his hip where the muscles bunch from the strain of trying to keep still. Harry bites him there _hard_ and then again on the inside of his thigh, pausing to admire the quickening rush of Eggy's blood to the marks, an extra pair of incisors in place of the first molars. Harry wonders if Eggsy would let him break the skin there, over all the secret vulnerable places on his body, and lap up the answering rivulets of blood.

Eggsy's fingers in his hair bring Harry back to his task, and he grips Eggsy's thighs to heave them up and apart, giving Harry a full view of the mess he's made. Eggsy hisses at the sensation of Harry's hot breath against his cock, but he's too exhausted for anything more tonight.

Perseverance, promises. Harry smiles like a snake. "This fantasy, however, is all my own," he says lightly and without warning, kneels down to press his lips where Eggsy is hot and tender and leaking.

" _OhfuckHarry_." Eggsy jerks, unsure whether to press closer or pull away. Harry is proud of him – even now, on some primordial outcropping of Eggsy's racial memory, every instinct is screaming to run. Harry laughs and knows Eggsy can feel it, opens his mouth and curls his tongue inside.

Eggsy is too overwhelmed to even shout, the thin reedy cry that leaves his throat so akin to pain that it makes Harry wild. He pushes his tongue in further, brackets Eggsy's hips to keep him still while he eats him out, sloppy and merciless, frenzied on the slick, obscene sounds of penetration, the taste of his own bitter semen, and Eggsy's fingernails prickling like electric sparks over his scalp.

Eggsy is quivering like a leaf by the time he's finished, and his cheeks are shiny with tears. "Harry," he croaks. " _Fuck_ , oh, Harry."

He says Harry's name the way he called out before to God, dumbstruck with desire, and it pleases Harry deliciously to occupy even that portion of Eggsy's brain that connects miracles and prayers with religion. The snobs upstairs still haven't worked out that a prayer ignored is an open door for anyone to close behind them; that dramatic little shit Rodin had it all wrong – the gates of Hell are nothing more perilous and tortured than a hospitable mind.

Harry lingers in bed counting each damned figure on the great French masterpiece from memory and then draws the covers from his lap. "Well, goodnight, then- "

Eggsy rolls into him and rudely interrupts his diplomatic withdrawal, nuzzling into Harry's bare shoulder as his fingers encroach his space one inch at a time, alighting on his wrists, creeping vine-like around him with proprietous ease. "Mm. Goodnight, Harry."

Harry freezes and then melts slowly, suspiciously into the embrace. Discretion is the better part of valour in such delicate matters as these. Surely indulging the boy just this one time can't hurt, he reasons and allows himself to be clutched tighter in Eggsy's sturdy arms.

 

**viii.**

Often in moments of solitary contemplation – hunched over an icy sniper scope or idling inside dark, unmarked cars – Eggsy turns Harry's existence over and over like a pebble in his mind, carving out the logical conclusion that if the Devil should exist, then so must God.

Harry does nothing to stop him: an ineffable mystery is vulnerable to worship, but a tangible figure has the opportunity to become a villain. The Deists have came closest to divining Chester's true _pia fraus_ , a God that created the universe and then abandoned it to its own freedoms. But Chester is not an absent god, only a cruel, careless one; even Harry pays more attention to the poor stupid creatures, albeit to make their lives more bloody difficult than they are already.

Deep down in his bones, Eggsy understands this, keeps his strong chin unbowed over dinnerside graces and discourages Daisy from the sort of lip-service piety that prolongs every child's bedtime for a few precious minutes; pissing against Chester's ivory tower any way he can, which cheers Harry considerably, at least till Eggsy pursues a similar vein towards Harry and Hell and its own penchant for human playthings – the iniquities of the father taught unto his progeny.

Doubt is a vile bitter seed, planted too deeply to fully upturn and likely to germinate at inopportune moments, its sustaining fruit so like the tree of knowledge that men often mistake it for truth. Truth is far too single-faced for Harry's liking, and Eggsy is ripening too lushly to be culled so soon off the vine.

So Harry cultivates him against any sort of real enlightenment, prunes away his curiosity with a caress, the memory of his voice, and any earnest theological pursuit is quickly waylaid by Eggsy's unseemly fondness for kisses.

Kissing serves well enough as the flint and steel that tips a hand towards sin, but the act in and of itself is outside the purview of Hell, in Harry's personal opinion. Still, he resolves to make the most of it, turns each of Eggsy's overtures into a breathless, carnal, messy affair, especially if he can leverage them to rouse Eggsy into another paroxysm of lust while the results of their first are still cooling on Eggsy's skin.

"Harry," Eggsy finally sighs one evening and turns away, smiling, from Harry's nipping teeth. They're still standing in the open front door, and Eggsy's post-mission suit is rumpled with a spot of blood on one cuff. Harry hopes the entire street sees them like this. "It's just a kiss, luv. It don’t have to be the start of anything."

"I rather thought all your affections were intended to be the start of something," Harry replies with coy ignorance, intending to galvanise him, but Eggsy's expression gridlocks before horror and pity and shame bloom across his face like onrushing clouds.

"Fuck, ain't no one kissed you proper before?" Eggsy touches his cheek.

The gesture is intolerably sweet, and if Harry possessed a heartbeat inside his chest, he might have been moved. "I rather thought that's what I was doing to you," he replies severely, but Eggsy just gives him a watery smile and leans up for a quick chaste peck on the lips.

"There," he declares. "That's our ‘welcome home’ kiss, alright? I expect you to remember it."

"I'm not sure I do." Harry cocks his head, offering Eggsy a sly smile. "I believe I need another demonstration."

Their next kiss is far less innocent than the last, and Harry counts it as a personal victory when Eggsy's mouth opens hungrily against his.

 

**ix.**

Atropos is standing sentinel at the crest of a hill, just above where Harry’s spread out a picnic lunch. Below them in the valley, Eggsy and Roxy are raiding a remote Ecuadorian resort that’s under suspicion of harbouring a few particularly _wanted_ tourists.

“Quite a lovely soul you have there," she says. Her bladed legs whisper together like rich silks as she uncrosses them. She's biding her time, waiting for brittle threads to fray, ready to be sheared.

"The boy has my protection," Harry reminds her. So far he's done nothing but pour out a libation from his best bottle of wine – a token of respect met with silent approval – but now it appears she's is in the mood to offer conversation in return.

"You aren't that sort of god." A whicker of movement, and a ribbon of grass floats past Harry's leg. "I'm the one who will reap his soul."

"Perhaps you'll allow me to winnow away a few choice morsels of my own." Careful, careful, Harry reminds himself. He would do well to fear this woman – the inevitable, the destroyer. Gazelle, he remembers. She likes to be called Gazelle, the only name anyone dares to speak aloud. Not even Chester is immune to her blade, should it be her whim.

Gazelle laughs, and the hairs on the back of Harry's neck stand up. "Don't lecture me on harvesting, Hades. Your wife’s mother knows the art better than you."

If Gazelle is making an appearance, she must be expecting a right spectacle of a massacre, and call Harry old-fashioned, but he’s always made it a point to defer to a lady’s judgement in the matters of her own house.

His hand is admirably steady as he pours out another round of wine into two glasses, leaving one perched on the slope beside him. "Harry," he corrects. "Wrong god, madam."

"Same mythology," Gazelle replies absently, and Harry feels her attention slide away from him, the uneasy weight of his own mortality lifting from his body. He’s about to strike up a pointed discussion on the interchangeability of chthonic deities when an explosion rocks the cluster of unfinished flats in the town square, and Harry applies his attention towards nipping Eggsy out from underneath a falling girder instead, arms underneath Eggsy's knees and around his waist to lift him clean off the ground and into the protection of Harry's body as debris shatters around them.

Eggsy is of course, delighted. "You're the guv’nor, you are," he crows and pecks Harry on the cheek, far too cheerful for a man quite literally in Satan’s grasp.

"Troublesome boy," Harry scolds, and thumbs away a spot of soot marring Eggsy's nose as he sets him back on his feet. Already the eerie feeling of discorporation is evaporating from Harry's skin, and he's thinking of champagne and strawberries, sherry trifle and caviar crostini in a wicker basket; gluttony in all its entrapments.

Eggsy relinquishes his hold around Harry's neck to dust off his bulletproof jacket – cleanliness is next to vanity, Harry notes with pride – and then gives him a rakish wink. "Watch this,” Eggsy demands and then leaps straight out of the partially-collapsed window frame and into a two-storey drop.

"How could I look away, darling?" Harry intones obediently, smiling in spite of himself. Such a lovely soul indeed, he sighs as Eggsy scales down broken brick and twisted iron to the street below, and what a pity that Eggsy is so careless with its safekeeping.

It's then that Harry notices his distant grassy hillside is empty save for a checkered blanket, a wicker picnic basket, and two wine glasses – one of them untouched and the other lying empty on the grass.

" _Fuck_ ," Harry says succinctly, and that's when the entire mission goes to shit.


End file.
